This eccentric and wealthy merchant is famous for
employing large numbers of unemployed men to excavate a series of tunnels
underneath his properties in Edge Hill. Though some of these are thought to
have a practical use (one is said to lead from his house to the church so he
can walk there privately) most are arranged in a seemingly mad and functionless
way.

Williamson always claimed that these were built to employ
the large numbers of men left without work after the Napoleonic war, although
that doesn’t quite explain why he had them building functionless tunnel systems
instead of anything else.

Williamson was renowned for his odd character, strange
disappearances and his poor relationship with his wife. On his death a range of
unusual people are called to the vaulted ‘Banqueting Hall’ beneath his house.

All those called are Ladies, or at least, women. Some
might be family members or household staff, some could be people Williamson had
encountered on the street or in church, or simply people he had read about.
Some of those present could be friends or servants of those called.

Regardless, as the will is read, all the women present is
given access to Williamsons private tunnel system and ‘a share of the
discoveries thereof’.

And as the players explore this tunnel system, they find
portals. Each portal leads to a different reality, to Carcosa, Yoon-Suin,
Vornheim, Vovoidia, Quelong, Marlinkio, Arthurian England, Mouse-Guard World,
Al Quadim, action-movie 80’s Hong Kong and others. Maybe even the Imperium of
Man and the Federation. Williamson had a junction to the multiverse beneath his
house.

Char-Gen is a hack of ‘Into The Odd’ so who you are
depends on how many Hit Points you roll and how big your highest stat is.

Its 3d6 down the line; STR, DEX and WILL, swap two if you
want to and then roll a d6 for Hit Points.

There is very little equipment on this list because you
are a Victorian Lady. You would’t be expected to have any. You will have to buy
it or find it.

Tuesday, 26 April 2016

This is my pitch for a prospective Level One adventure. It's also the entirety of my notes for the adventure. It's also as complete as the adventure is ever likely to be.

(an adventure for level 1 players)

I'm imagiing a small black dog that constantly foils the PC's

steals babies and runs off with them

breaks into houses and bites the noses off old women

extremely racist

an evil genius

sets up traps

lures you into bad situations

leads you into dens of criminals

hides in the bog and lures you in to drown

sometimes spasms and attacks own tail

steals burning torches and sets churches on fire

kind of wheezes and yowls insanely instead of barking

stampedes cows

jumps on horses and rides them, guiding them by biting

sends carts running out of control

steals rare and valuable things and leaves them in the PC's packs without them knowing

ends up setting a gigantic fire and escaping on the keel of an upturned boat that goes down the river

shits in the font

digs up fresh graves (it never seems to sleep) and runs off with wedding rings

drops pigeon corpses into the well, poisoning it

eventually ends up leading a pack of wolves through town

hides in the toilet, waiting for you

steals money and throws it in the river

steals magic items and throws them in the well

runs along rooftops, has learn how to use ladders and climb trees

confuses the lock-manager by killing the crowing cock that wakes them up, then imitating the sound at the wrong time, so they end up flooding the town

keeps the doctor awake all night by yowling outside his window

can scream like a cat

pisses in your bed, poops in your shoes

it will only poop in human shoes (this is its one weakness)

takes drugs when it can (another weakness) and drinks to a shameful degree (it never becomes incapacitated)

gestures with its eyebrows

can smell fear

thinks you're kind of a pussy

pushes old men under water wheels

thows dead cats in between the windmills grinding-wheels, ruining the corn

when the mill-wheels are taken out for washing, it removes the chocks and sents one rolling through town, smashing through walls

it uses this to break into the bank (it wants the money, which it will throw in the river)

people think an old man is master of the dog but he is terrified of it

you get sucked into its all-encompassing plan

it rules crime in this town, the thieves guild are all terrified of it

attacks pregnant women

spooks the shire-horses pulling the canal-boats through town and makes them pull the boats to one side so they block the canal and capsize

the mayor hired an assasin from the captial to kill it, the dog ate him an now wears his bloodstained cloak, the assassins guild refuses to believe this has happened and has sent another assasin to kill the mayor

the local wizard tried to remove the curse upon the dog, but there was no curse and the dog stole his spell book and dropped it in the well

the dog intends to blow up the brewery somehow

the local cultists tried summoning a demon to destroy the dog but the dog licked away part of their magic circle and the demon escaped and ate them

the demon is a little scared of the dog

at a wedding the dog jumped into the wedding cake and no-one could get it out

a widow of a colonel who retired in town has called up the guard but the dog has outwitted them at every turn

it seems to be everywhere

no-one will send help to the town as no-one will belive that its just a dog doing this and the townspeople are too scared to admit the truth

a small faction on the town council is considering putting the dog in charge, since it does what it wants anyway

people think maybe the PC's will help, but some think they are doomed and others, who still can't quite accept that its just a dog, think the real villian will eventually reveal themselves and that this might be the PC's

the town is consumed by paranoia, the existence of a 'dog-faction' has leaked out and a whispering campaign has divided the people, everyone is afraid that others might somehow be on the side of the worlds most evil dog

Monday, 25 April 2016

Ok the staring eyes are always the first thing, are they intended to feel staring or is it just the style of the culture? We don't know but the omni-presence suggests its a cultural thing.

Second thing; the dotted circles and the eyes, these are the same thing. Is that deliberate or just a convenience of form? Is this a creature with many eyes?

The triangle-face outlined in sharp strokes to emphasise its shape and then the strikes across the triangle. What does this tell us about the face? Is it a war face? Is it an armoured mask? Is that a furrowed brow indicated by the second line on the upper side?

The slumped strong shoulders. The roundness and irregular curve.

Is this guy wearing clothes and are those triskelions of eye-shapes the memories of decorations or do they indicate some kind of armour or amulet?

The crosshatching around the bottom, is that a belt or the hem of a dress or the hem of a tunic?

How does he make you feel when you look at him? Strong. solid. Impassive or at least, immovable. Not directly-threatening. Slow. Like a living shield and perhaps his face is a shield, and hes kind of cute, and depending on how you think of it, a little scary, especially if that is a shield-face with eyes. He feels very alice-in-wonderland, that mixture of playful and spooky.

What are the lines doing?

The lines falling down across the shoulders are telling you that they are shoulders, the curve of the plane to the top is not allowed to fade into insignificance they imbue with humanity, they emphasise masculinity and strongness. They tell you this thing/person is wearing clothes.

They break the triangle into the three-thirds of the human face, here the eyes somehow must be eyes and nothing else. The downward slant, like an arrow or a slice of pie cutting into the general form. What does that do? Cutting into the curve, emphasising the breadth.

Rosie says she thinks this is a sheep and hes humble and those are his arms and he probably works in a shop or something and goes and gets your order and brings it back without looking you in the eye.

Because the face looks sad.

The crosshatched band around the bottom, giving you the rim. Sealing it to the board.

I'm looking at this guy, trying to unfold the mystery of the figure, the reason for the shape, when for the person that made it everything was simple and clear
intuitive.

You make it round like 'this' to hold it, you're carving it in your hands so you know when it feels right. You put the triangle in there, maybe the shape just wanted to be a triangle. You put lines in where it seems like you would need some lines and then its done, and you know when its done becasue its very clearly done.

Put it down on the table, there you go. Whatever is informing you about the correctness of the piece it isn't coming in words or in any kind of abstraction its a form-lead form, it has no explanations to make, it has no particular answer to give, it just is, where it needs to be.

Monday, 11 April 2016

I’ve been thinking about our (my) design problem and
about possible solutions. The idea of the ‘Adventure Stanza’ is my potential
solution, though maybe too ‘froofy’/abstract
to be useful.

I’m going to talk about this in two ways to start;

One; as it relates to layout, or the interrelationship of
space.

Two; as it relates to the interrelationship of
information.

SPACE

If we assume a double page A5 spread, meant to be looked at and considered as one
thing then there must be;

- a roughly-optimal font size.

- a roughly-optimal number of words you can get on the
spread at that size.

If we assume, like Medusa Maze, that we have a little
mini-map on this spread showing all the rooms described in it and how they
relate to the rest of the dungeon, then for each number of rooms on a single
spread there should be an optimal page count per room.

It might go something like this;

A5, 2 page spread Attempt One

Words per page; 900

Words per room

1 - 900

2 - 450

3 - 300

4 - 225

But, the way this imaginary dungeon works might be quite
different to the way Medusa Maze works.

If the map is just a map, and not art, perhaps it would
be smaller.

If the map is a top-down room-picture like the ones
Kelvin Green does, then that would change the interrelationship of space as
well.

Perhaps it would be better to start with a basic number
count, assuming no art or map present, and then go on from there;

A5, 2 page spread Attempt Two

We can take this as our basic 'budget' of information and
then start deducting things from it. The things we deduct might include;

·Corner Map

·Art

·Stats

·Tables

·White Space (for notes, Zak is fond of this
option)

Obviously all these things interrelate and can (and
perhaps should) be unique to a page.

Someone intelligent could probably work these up into
something like an excel table.

A5 Double Spread

Number of rooms

WPR – blank page

WPR with ‘Medusa-syle’
corner map( – 1/8)

1

1300

1136

2

650

568

3

325

284

4

162

141

5

80

70

Or for an A4 spread, try this;

A4 Double Spread

Number of rooms

WPR – blank page

WPR with ‘Medusa-syle’
corner map( – 1/8)

1

2500

2272

2

1300

1136

3

650

568

4

325

284

5

162

141

(These numbers might be junk, I’m not that smart. The
point is the idea.

INFORMATION

The reason I called it a stanza and not just a spread
isn’t just to be pretentious. The idea isn't just about the space on a
page-spread. It’s also about the interrelationship of information on a spread.

Ideally, everything in a single stanza, which is also a
single spread, should interrelate within itself and produce few, or no 'instant
interrelations' with the rest of the book.

As I'm defining it here, an 'instant interrelation' is a
piece of information, or a reference, that causes you to flip back and forth
between this spread and something else held elsewhere.

Obviously the definition of an ‘instant interrelation’
might differ a bit for each person, depending on their familiarity with the
system and how they play the game.

Flipping to a ‘what’s in their pockets’ table when
searching a body isn’t that bad as its assumed to happen after a fight in most
cases and the person waiting doesn’t mind waiting a little bit longer..

Flipping for a monsters AC or a special effect that takes
place in a fight is the worst kind of flipping as a fight has the greatest
amount in information going back and forth around the table and the results
have the greatest consequence.

Flipping for a special drug effect or trap effect might
not be that bad. It might not wound the player to wait a bit to see what’s
going to happen, provided that what’s going to happen is sufficiently
interesting.

I think the key here is that the tension of the choice
should not conflict with other multi-origin tensions happening at the same
time. All the data needed for those should be in one stanza.

HOW THIS COULD HELP US

Currently, when we (I) write adventures, we write a bunch
of stuff and do a bunch of art and then the layout person has the nightmare job
of trying to jam it all in together on a spread in a way that is both
attractive and useful.

Sometimes the layout person is also the writer or
creator, but this is rare, more usually they are an expert in layout, not
information architecture.

This leads to imperfect and ugly results. I don’t mean
ugly layout on the page, that’s
usually avoided, I mean an ugly arrangement
of ideas. An ugly architecture of
thought.

But if we knew the budget,
if we knew the basic allowance of words for the spread size we were writing for
first, and if we know the general
takeaways from that budget for art, maps, tables and stats, then we could work
differently.

Instead of writing, then arranging, then jamming in art
last our process might go something like this.

“Ah ha, so this is a LotFP adventure. That means the
pages will be A5. Let’s assume a word budget of 1300 per spread. It’s a dungeon
and we have the standard ‘medusa method’ map taking up roughly 1/8 of a spread.
That brings us down to 1137.

So if I want to arrange four rooms together then I have
about 284 words per room. Let’s say I
want two unique monsters in these rooms, or the possibility of that at least,
that’s two stat columns, so that brings us down to say 230 per room.

But I want the monsters to have interesting personalities,
they aren’t just monsters, they are
embedded in the social context of the dungeon, and I want the DM energised,
interested and inventive when they play them. So let’s say I want each of them
to have a d6 two-column reaction/personality table. I can embed a lot of
condensed information about them in those tables as the DM will read them and
even if they don’t use all the results then they will still pick up a lot of
‘mood’ from the possibilities.

Now we’re at roughly 200 per room, not that bad if I have
two sets of stats and two tables to play with as well.”

Point being, we could write and create for each ‘room’
grouping’ or ‘hex grouping’ or idea grouping of any other kind and so long as
we knew how information related to space and how much space we had and how much
each kind of ‘extra’ thing would impact that space, then we could just write
neat stanzas of thought and interaction and stop killing layout guys with
stress and having imperfect janky pages.

Instead of imagining the adventure in one long unbroken
sequence and then chopping it up, we could think of it in pulses of information
, or ‘stanzas’.

“So ok,

·The map of the area around the giants house,
that’s one stanza.

·They might end up in this weird forest, that’s
not the main point of the adventure, but it should be interesting, we’ll make
that one stanza.

·Getting into the house, that’s one stanza.

·No, breaking
in is one stanza. They might persuade or trick the giant, and if we make
the giants personality one stanza then we can have a picture, some background
text and a bunch of interrelated tables just for what happens if you talk to
him.

·If we say fighting
the giant is one stanza then we can have a bunch of complex effects, like how
he throws you, what if he uses a horse as a weapon etc, so the Giant Fight can
be one stanza.

·Is the inside of the house one stanza? Well it’s
a giant house, so like a mad palace with giant mice & giant traps etc, so
let’s make upstairs & downstairs separate stanzas.

·And of course the giant likes to swallow people
in a fight, so let’s make the inside
of the giant one stanza, like a liquid mini-dungeon.

·The giants giant treasure might not be one stanza
on thier own, but transporting them, and people/bandits interested in them,
might be. So let’s make that one.

A POSSIBLE CHALLENGE

Could we use this method to transform a badly laid-out
adventure into a well laid-out adventure?

We have already done the thing where we re-write an old
TSR adventure and made it a new weird one. I’m not talking about the content here, but about the layout,
informational architecture and usefulness.

In fact, Palace of the Silver Princess might be a very
good start for a project of this kind. We’ve already changed it enough that
fiddling with it wouldn’t present any serious copyright issues.

Point being, if we went through this thing and broke it
down and applied the Adventure Stanza principal to it, and documented and wrote
about what we did and how it worked, could we turn that experience into a kind
of ‘guide book’ for creating adventures, not just their laying out, or
usefulness, or conception or poetic quality, but the combination of them all on
the page?

And if would could collectively work out the basic
‘informational budgets’ for different pag /font combinations and the various
deductions and for different kinds of page furniture and a rough taxonomy of
tables and their usefulness (I think various people have addressed this
already) and if we could get it all together in one place then we could just
make a lulu document like that ‘OSR Primer’ that guy did.

Then no-one would need to write shiftily laid-out
adventures.

They would probably make mediocre adventures instead.
BUT, the bar would be raised! And its better to work out how to hack a useful
system that to have to invent a
useful system, probably.

Tuesday, 5 April 2016

I've only been doing this for about 6 years so this might actually be all of them.

Two aliens in a game of Traveller based on a video game. One a talky academic type, the other a vacuum suited engineer. I think these were the first.

Noble german officer in Zombie-ruined WWII USSR. Cant remember name. Shot I think. Played a young girl after that.

DAMODAR! - Brave trident-armed fighter who died in the dwarven ruins in the Mountains of the Moon above Silash Vo. Very stupid and very brave. Canonically I think the first Player Character to die in Yoon-Suin.

Anil of Manpac - Cleric of MANPAC. Kind of misogynist or, at least, troubled. Eunach. Multiversal traveller. Last seen wandering the Gorgolith with a gigantic siege tower made of bone. Presumed still at large.

I think there was a Papa Sierra as well, not sure what happened to him.

Chemical Jack - Drug addicted rogue. Devotee of the 52 pages. Still at large somewhere in the multiverse.

Urtlan hiCharsha - Priest of Thumis. From Tekumel. Presumed still at large after escaping undead dinner party.

Vasken Hoarder - Two goblins standing on each others shoulders and pretending to be the same person. Fighter. Weapon was a plank. Survived a surprisingly long time before being killed.

Ursula - Would be party leader in the investigation of the Tale of the Scarecrow. Alchemist. As her very first action in the game she poisoned herself by mistake by eating evil coin. Was dragged through rest of adventure but dies before its end.

Orve Heuzengork - Specialist or 'Artifex'. Last seen in the Nathanverse, trying to get back rights to her bar.

Orchard Blackbright - Magic User. Creepy evil ex-carpenter bastard with an evil book, product of the Lore of Lamentations. Still at large somewhere.

Amy Dreel - Extremely good looking, intelligent, but quite physically weak fighter. Was briefly mind and body swapped with elf but returned to normal eventually. Still at large. Hope she's ok, I liked her.

Kulkblaser Monsterhole - Half-inuit rogue. Veteran of the frozen north and renowned cheese merchant. Managed to briefly seduce a succubus and fought her giant slime ogre to a standstill in thrilling one-on-one combat before being failed by IDIOTIC COLLEAGUES during hostage negotiation. His treasures are still there somewhere beneath an isolate island in the southern ocean.

Pirate Woman with 18 STR who I perversely made a Magic-User as 'that's more interesting'. Stepped on by a giant in the Gorgolith whilst trying to steal his hat. Cant remember her name but it was based on a blog-comment Captcha

Simal - Drow Barbarian fangirl. Travelled dimensions to a giant mushroom where she leapt into the mouth of a gigantic beast beneath the earth (or at least, beneath the surface of the mushroom.

Subal - Wolf polymorphed into a man. Magic User. Escaped the death of his colleage Simal and last seen in a trans-planar airship of some kind. Presumed still at large.

Li Bao - Ancient Chinese 'Drunken Immortal' taoist philosopher monk transported through realities to the Crime Syndicate version of America. First super her he encountered was Superman, whom he subsequently defeated (or deluded really, but he survived.)

Zengar of Strongtown - Void Monk of Centarra. Shot to death but froze his body in time at the moment of death, fell to the bottom of a canyon in Centerra. Probably still there.

Herman Shultz - Die Schochker. Jew Terrorist Number One in dark-nazi-future Vornheim New York. Still just about alive despite encountering sexy girls underground.

'Fiddlin' Joe Cooper - Thief. Multerversal traveller. Currently living with his baby mamma in Osc Leth (or possibly Osc Lithicum) somewhere in the Vornwelt, or Gorgolith. The highest-level survivor and the only one to successfuly start a family and retire.

Jennifer Pipes - Barbarian. Multiversal traveller. Stabbed to death by Sea Elves on the Gorgolith during failed hostage negotiations.